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NEWS: ADV Court Documents Reveal Amounts Paid for 29 Anime Titles

TJ_Kat wrote:

The opposite can also be true. Ford recently had a $12 billion dollar positive adjustment due to tax gains from writing off their losses over the past several years. However, that doesn't mean that the government came and handed Ford $12 billion in money back. However, they will be using that adjustment to offset taxes for the next several years and will likely pay little or no income tax for the next several years.

Actually it does, the money that Ford didn't have to pay the government in taxes is money that government handed to them. If you found out that your neighbor, who makes the same amount of money as you and in the same tax bracket, didn't have to pay taxes because he claimed a loss, then would you consider that a government handout? Your neighbor is not going bankrupt, losing his home or car. He just claimed a loss, because he had a bad investment somewhere last year and is off-setting the money he has to pay in taxes. However, you can't do the same, because you can't claim a loss.

[Income] Tax is a fiscal balance that the government does annually. They want to know where money is coming and going That's what a W-2 is. When your employer claims your pay check as a loss, they pass that loss to you as your gain. When you win a big prize at a casino, you also get a W-2 (or whatever that form is) because the casino is passing that loss as your gain. When the lender takes your home away at a loss, you will, believe it or not, get something from the government stating that you gained whatever the lender lost and charge you the tax on it. It sounds really awful and unfair, but for every "-" there has to be a "+" or the accounting will not add up.

BTW, the Sgt. Frog numbers are based on the license for eps. 1-51,

Metanomaly wrote:

Looking at this list, it's like ADV didn't do any market research at all before agreeing to these licensing deals...

The bigger problem is that ADV had NO SAY in the licensing deals. Sojitz was able to force them to take titles, decide how much they pay for them, and even override them on marketing decisions. Sojitz also appointed people to various positions inside ADV and had control over their finances.

PurpleWarrior13 wrote:

BTW, the Sgt. Frog numbers are based on the license for eps. 1-51,

"Season 2" appears on later documents thus this should only be for S1 (1-26-ish).

dragonrider_cody wrote:

Metanomaly wrote: Looking at this list, it's like ADV didn't do any market research at all before agreeing to these licensing deals... The bigger problem is that ADV had NO SAY in the licensing deals. Sojitz was able to force them to take titles, decide how much they pay for them, and even override them on marketing decisions. Sojitz also appointed people to various positions inside ADV and had control over their finances.

No, the agreement was very clear that ADV would decide on titles, lead negotiations, and everything in acquisitions and that ARM was just supposed to approve spending. Now the question is who at ADV was making which decisions for titles.

bayoab wrote:

No, the agreement was very clear that ADV would decide on titles, lead negotiations, and everything in acquisitions and that ARM was just supposed to approve spending. Now the question is who at ADV was making which decisions for titles.

Actually no it didn't. The contract made t quite clear that Sojitz could override ADVs decisions. Even if it didn't, the personnel who were in charge of making those decisions were employees of ARM/Sojitz. So effectively Sojitz had put themselves in charge of acquisitions. That's why there was such a conflict of interests here. It would be like putting your credit card company in charge of balancing your checkbook and budget.

The prices for some of those series are eyepopping, from the aforementioned Kurau to the dirt-cheapness of Magikano and the Air movie (I can't say they are all-around terrible, but some more than others…). To think Pumpkin Scissors was worth $3/4 million, when the Welcome to the NHK was much less and better reviewed, is absurd (that PS was worth that much alone is crazy). And I'm a huge Red Garden fan, but wow… O.O

Underwaterrayromano and Air seem to be the best deals.

dragonrider_cody wrote:

bayoab wrote: No, the agreement was very clear that ADV would decide on titles, lead negotiations, and everything in acquisitions and that ARM was just supposed to approve spending. Now the question is who at ADV was making which decisions for titles. Actually no it didn't. The contract made t quite clear that Sojitz could override ADVs decisions. Even if it didn't, the personnel who were in charge of making those decisions were employees of ARM/Sojitz. So effectively Sojitz had put themselves in charge of acquisitions. That's why there was such a conflict of interests here. It would be like putting your credit card company in charge of balancing your checkbook and budget.

1) The agreement does not mention Sojitz.
2) ARM could not override, only reject.

Now you can try and argue that the guys were acting as proxies. But it has to be considered that ADV only claims that they were intentionally overpaying. ADV never claims they were acting on their own by licensing stuff ADV didn't want to license.

Ranma824 wrote:

Underwaterrayromano and Air seem to be the best deals.

ADV already paid for the Air TV series, so they may had gotten a discount on the movie. Utawarerumono seems to be outstanding debt still owed, not total payments.

For comparison, IIRC Disney gave Tokuma $10 million upfront for the Ghibli films in 1997, and Nelvana paid $2 million for 4 years for Card Captor Sakura. (It's easier to get info from publicly-traded companies that have to file reports to the SEC.)

Also IIRC, it used to be that it takes 40,000 unit sales to be considered a hit.

By taking back all the licenses, why would ADV owe ARM (and later FUNimation) anything? You default on your mortgage, your lender takes your house away, but you don't have to keep paying for the mortgage anymore.

I realize taking the licenses back doesn't exactly amount to the same thing since some titles had already been released for a while so you'd expect some money to be owed for them, but most certainly not the full amount.

TJ_Kat wrote:

By taking back all the licenses, why would ADV owe ARM (and later FUNimation) anything? You default on your mortgage, your lender takes your house away, but you don't have to keep paying for the mortgage anymore. I realize taking the licenses back doesn't exactly amount to the same thing since some titles had already been released for a while so you'd expect some money to be owed for them, but most certainly not the full amount.

Yeah that's what I don't understand either, when ADV already paid $8,963,006 for these titles which they have lost and are now in Funi's possession from the time they folded...

I know very little about the history and the lawsuit itself other than Funimation's claim that ADV owes them $8 million, so can someone recap and distill the situation?

Finally, it's nice to see actual numbers for what licensing actually does give back to the producers. From what I've heard about Bamboo Blade and other series, shows can run between something like 75,000 to 120,000 per episode to produce. So are licensing fees really only a small factor to help the bottom line?